I've personally seen the thing he talks about in part V when Facebook started sucking traffic off musicians' sites:

So clearly the best thing for an artist is to sell fans digital downloads of their music directly off their own website. And indeed that is what most artists try to do. And the most engaged fans will go to your website and buy your music that way. Failing that you could also sell your music through Bandcamp or CDbaby and net a little more than you would on iTunes.

Here’s the problem with that:

Facebook, YouTube and Twitter ate our web traffic.

It started with Myspace and got worse when Facebook added band pages. Somewhere around 2008 every artist I know experienced a dramatic collapse in traffic to their websites. The Internet seems to have a tendency towards monopoly. All those social interactions that were happening on artists websites aggregated on facebook. Facebook pages made many band’s community pages irrelevant. It is so much more convenient for your fans. Think about it. Your fans are probably already on Facebook all day anyway. It’s so much easier for them to interact with other fans and artists on Facebook.

Most artists I know now mostly use their websites to manage their facebook and twitter presence.

But it's really the more complicated stuff about royalties and recording costs that gets really interesting.

It's also bound to shake a few hornets' nests, since Lowery is not Lars Ulrich - he's a Northern California freak with a history of independence (released most of his stuff on his own labels) who's sued major labels for various slights in the past. (I also never knew he'd worked as a quant trader in the past.)

I was wondering if anyone still around here had seen this, and maybe what y'all thought about what this stuff might mean for the future of indie music.